Thursday, March 21, 2013

The Day of the Locust (1975)

In terms of artistic
ambition and physical scale, The Day of
the Locust is easily one of the most impressive studio movies of the ’70s.
Working with first-class collaborators including cinematographer Conrad Hall,
director John Schlesinger did a remarkable job of re-imagining ’30s Hollywood
as a dark phantasmagoria comprising endless variations of debauchery, desire,
despair, disappointment, and, finally, death. As a collection of subtexts and
surfaces, The Day of the Locust is
beyond reproach.

Alas, something bigger and deeper must be present in order to
hold disparate elements together, and even though Schlesinger’s film was
adapted from a book many regard as one of the great literary achievements of
the 20th century, The Day of the Locust
lacks a unifying force. Schlesinger and his team strive so desperately to make
a Big Statement that the movie sinks into pretentious grandiosity, and
Schlesinger’s choice to present every character as a grotesque makes The Day of the Locust little more than
an exquisitely rendered freak show.

Novelist Nathanael West based his 1939 book
The Day of the Locust on his own
experiences as a writer in ’30s Hollywood, capturing the has-beens, never-weres, and wanna-bes living on the fringes
of the film industry. West’s book is deeply metaphorical, with much of its
power woven into the fabric of wordplay. So, while screenwriter Waldo
Salt’s adaptation of The Day of the
Locust is admirable for striving to capture subtle components of West’s
book, the effort was doomed from the start—some of the images West conjures are
so arch that when presented literally onscreen, they seem overwrought. Plus,
the basic story suffers from unrelenting gloominess.

The narrative pushes these characters together and pulls
them apart in wavelike rhythms that work on the page but not on the screen. And
in the end, ironic circumstances cause Hollywood to erupt in a hellish riot.

Considering that Schlesinger’s film career up to this point mostly comprised
such tiny character studies as Darling
(1965) and Midnight Cowboy (1969),
it’s peculiar that he felt compelled to mount a production of such gigantic
scale, and it’s a shame that his excellent work in constructing individual
moments gets overwhelmed by the movie’s bloated weirdness. In fact, nearly every scene has
flashes of brilliance, but The Day of the
Locust wobbles awkwardly between moments that don’t completely work because
they’re too blunt and ones that don’t completely work because they’re too
subtle. Predictably, actors feel the brunt of this uneven storytelling.
Atherton gets the worst of it, simply because he lacks a leading man’s
charisma, and Black’s characterization is so extreme she’s unpleasant to
watch. Meredith’s heart-rending vulnerability gets obscured behind the silly
overacting that Schlesinger clearly encourages, and Sutherland’s performance is
so deliberately bizarre that it borders on camp, even though he displays fierce emotional commitment.